August 23, 2015

Inevitably, 9 hours were spent at the organ today. At least two of those hours were spent composing an exposition of a new Fugue in F Major (in 5/2), which has turned out to be a 5-voice piece. I'm not sure how I feel about that yet. I might scale it back to 4 voices. The majority of my practice was devoted to music for a service I'll be playing next month. I've chosen a simple 3-voice setting of Vater Unser by Praetorius for the prelude (which is called the Voluntary in the Episcopal service), but might add a second piece because the Praetorius may be too short, even if I play through it twice (it merits a repeat).

BWV 545 is coming into focus. Very slow practice is the key, for me. In a couple of places I find it necessary to watch what my hands and feet are doing instead of watching the score (such as the two measures I pointed out last week), but I'm long past the point of having memorized the music anyway, so it's not a problem to look away from the score and back again at any point.

I finally got around to investigating publisher membership at ASCAP this week, something I have been meaning to do since becoming a publisher in January. I was disappointed to find out that ASCAP is now charging a $50 membership fee, so I decided against it, considering that it's highly unlikely any royalties would be disbursed to me at all, and even if they were, they would be much less than $50. In the process I found out that the one published composition that earned me a writer membership in 1996 (Fantasia and Fugue on St. Theodulph) had somehow been deleted from my ASCAP profile, so I went through the process of adding it to my registered catalog, along with my music now published by Zwillinge. Being reminded of the Fantasia and Fugue written 20 years ago, I got the idea to get back in touch with the organist who premiered the work at the AGO convention in New York, Mark Bani, so I wrote him an email. Mark had sent me a cassette recording of his rendition of the piece (not the concert recording) back in '96, which I transferred to digital a few years ago. I thought it might be fun to put this recording on YouTube, but not without Mark's permission. We'll see what he says; I have not received a response yet.

A page of Errata has been added at Zwillinge for three known errors printed in previous copies of the 24 Preludes and Fugues. I was pleased to receive help with the German language version of the webpage from my friend Wolf Peuker in Berlin, who also helped proofread all of the music for publication. My German continues to improve, but is nowhere near good enough for public consumption.